Changes to the Industrial Commodity System and a QoL change to BvB

2017·07·24by Dark Steel

Hello everyone. We’d like to share some up and coming changes to the Industrial Commodity (IC) system that we had planned for this universe reset. However due to an error this wasn’t patched in at the actual reset so we will be scheduling a patch to implement the changes next week. This post will be to inform you all about what exactly will be changing. We’re also making a QoL change to BvB that will be going in with the same patch.

Why?

First I’ll give some data on why we’re making the changes in the first place. Last uni I’ve kept an eye on the IC prices across the uni and after reviewing the data we came to the conclusion that the average price for most Tier 0 ICs (such as Steel Girders and Sentient Chatbots) was far below the 100% price mark (ICs vary in sale price from 200% to 50%). This varried per commodity with the highest being Steel Girders at 81% and the lowest being Paxian Figurines at 57%. This meant that a lot of AI stations were buying ICs are minimal prices. To remedy this we (mainly enkelin) did some math and came up with adjustments to the consumption rate of bases as well as the price. This will result in ICs being lower price but you can sell a lot more of them for an on average higher price.

Let me explain with an example: Last uni Paxian Figurines had their price average at 57%. The commodity is worth 37.500 credits at 100%. The average price you could sell it for was 21.375. After the patch the commodity is worth 18.750 at 100% but the consumption rate has been increased by 110% (x2.1), which means the AI bases will likely buy the commodity above the 100% mark which will almost certainly surpass the 21.375 you could sell the commod for last universe and you can sell more of it for that price.

What’s changing?

Below you will find the exact changes that we will be making next week. In addition to these changes you will nolongerbe able to sell off-theme commods to AI bases. So a Fusion cell base will only deal in Fusion Cells and its respective T1/2/3 commodity and nolonger deal in Steel Girders, Sentient Chatbots, Paxian Figurines, Fine Space Whisky, Sub-shield Buffers or Cyborg Brigade. We are also reducing the total output of the IC system by 20% as it was yielding more than intended.

QoL change to BvB

We’ll be introducing the ability for teams to lay Small Warp Beacons into owned galaxies as long as your team is eligible to BvB that galaxy. There’s two reasons to this. First of all the only reliable way to get 10.000 range (hardcap on permanent assets) away from enemy assets is by using a Singularity Brake (or the likes) on your (usually engineless) ship. However, when you warp into the galaxy you’re (of course) shot by the enemy assets, which will likely kill you instantly. The only way to then get out of range is to ‘beat’ the server’s response time (ping) when you get back in. So your ship goes yellow, you enter and instantly hit your Singularity Brake hotkey, and if you ‘beat’ the server ping, the warp goes off. If you didn’t ‘beat’ the server ping you’ll be shot by enemy assets again and die. Now, for people that live in or near United States (where the servers are located), you can ‘beat’ the server ping fairly reliably. However, for people across the world this is not the case which makes getting out of range to even engage in BvB extremely tedious if not impossible.

Secondly, we’ve had talks about teams being too scared to recruit new members in fear of them being spies and laying Small Warp Beacons to warp enemy ships in with. We’re hoping this change will reduce this fear.

Lastly, some have mentioned that this change cuts off any chance of keeping the assaulting team from even laying stations even if they do find them trying to get out of range. To counteract this we’ll be implementing a warning shout in a defending team’s Team chat when a BvB station gets deployed in one of their galaxies.

About Dark Steel

Hey I'm DarkSteel. I started playing Star Sonata in 2006 and I've probably played about 7 years since then. I've been part of the Development team since early 2016 and I'm mostly involved in content reworks and (re)balancing of content and items.